Religion and Nothingness

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Practically everyone has heard of when Nietzsche declared that God is dead at the end of the 19th century. And when you hear a statement like that it can sound like it’s something that’s hostile towards religion.

Imagine Nietzsche jumping up from his desk river dancing on amphetamines. Religion is stupid. It’s outdated. It leads people to lives that aren’t good for them or the world.

But as we’ll see by the end of this post, through the eyes of someone like Keiji Nishitani, the statement God is dead is not an anti-religious statement in any sense. In fact, to him it is a foreshadowing to what you could call a golden age of religious participation that may come about in the near future.

It’ll make more sense by the end of this.

And the way we get there is to talk about religion along the same lines that we talked about nihilism in the last post. Remember to Nishitani, it’s a mistake to only consider a piece of what something is to people, and then to pretend to understand the essence of the thing in its entirety.

We talked about how it’s possible to have a shallow relationship with nihilism and death, and how it’s possible to experience these things more deeply if you examine the ways that people usually frame them in an incomplete way.

Well, what would happen if we did this same thing when it comes to religion?

For the sake of covering as many sides of this as we can today let’s start with what an atheist might say about religion in the kind of world we live in.

Similar to the person from last time that sees nihilism as a problem to be solved, this person might think of religion as something that’s mostly just a security blanket for people.

That religion is obviously a sociological construct designed to not only control people but to give people easy answers to difficult questions in a complicated universe.

Things like morality, for a religious person under this view, aren’t difficult problems—just listen to what God has to say about it and then it’s objective and easy.

Who you are, identity, isn’t a complex or difficult thing—just read the book of Job or Matthew and it’ll more or less tell you who you should be.

In other words,